I was in a PhD program at a top university 20 years ago. It took me a couple of years to decide that the entire thing was about political pissing contests and begging for grant money. I quit and spent the last 20 years in industry searching for the same sort of intellectual challenge that I found in grad school. Neither has really met my desires, but at least in industry I get paid well.

His point about academics increasingly obsessed with reputation and academic politics is well taken and certainly reflects many other similar views I have read or heard. Whether or not it is worse now than 50 years ago, can’t say.

On narrowness of topic, not so sure. For me that overlaps with parallel issues like how esoteric the topic is, or indeed also how invalid it might be because reliant on some set of tropes that at least strike me as invalid. To hit the trifecta, something like a lengthy book on the implications of ‘possibly transgender’ religious ceremonial costume in 16th century Transylvania on recruitment of Szeklers to the Ottoman army marching on Vienna, and its implications for transgressing the nonbinary gender lines of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence.

Actually, I’d read a precis of that.

But I don’t know that I follow Caplan to the point that a book on a major historical event like the French wars of religion has no value for its own sake. I get the larger implications he draws, but the history of France during a formative period is interesting too.